Can Trump Make Harvard Great Again? The 298th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Today we discuss Harvard, higher ed, public health, AI, and political cheating. Harvard has announced the suspension of several graduate programs, as well as hiring and other budget freezes, claiming poverty due to the suspension of federal grants. But Harvard’s revenue last year was $6.7 billion, and their losses amount to 1.7% of that. Meanwhile, Trump wants Harvard to run trade schools. Then: vaccinologist Paul Offit admits that natural immunity was always superior to vaccine-induced immun...
Believe it or not, this is the 298th episode of the Dark Horse Podcast live stream.
It is not prime.
I'm not saying that other podcasts are not on a prime number this week, but we are not.
I'm Dr. Brett Weinstein.
You are Dr. Heather Haring.
It is, well, it is the very latest part of the very earliest stage of the Cartesian crisis, so I hope that's going well for everyone.
Oh, also autumn.
Also autumn.
Actually, we're kind of a little bit towards late now, aren't we?
No.
Wait a second.
It should have started September 20th-ish.
22nd, as it turns out.
Okay, so it started a little late.
One day.
And it is October.
I know that.
22nd.
second.
So that does make it, oh, wait, no.
No.
That makes it still the end of the first third.
Just like you were saying about the Asian crisis.
Yep.
Here we are.
Assuming everything we understand about the calendar is right.
It is.
I've written about this and talked about this before, but as you are well aware, the astronomical realities are what they are.
And the biological responses to the astronomical realities are what they are.
Our overlaying on those biological and astronomical realities, seasons of said length, and indeed of equal length to one another, is a social construct.
Because in my mind, summer and winter are more periods of stability and autumn and spring are periods of transition and generally periods of stability we tend to think of lasting longer.
And yet we have three-month summers, three-month autumns, three-month winters, three-month springs.
And so also, we start our seasons on the moment of astronomical reality as opposed to putting that in the middle.
So if we were doing things like they did in, say, Shakespeare's time, and the summer solstice was the middle of the summer, and the autumn equinox was the middle of fall, then you would be right.
It would be nearing the end of fall.
Yes, I actually 100% agree with this take.
And it reminds me of the distinction between time as humans experience it and laboratory time.
Scientists have to categorize it.
And I'm not arguing laboratory time doesn't exist.
It does.
It's the fundamental.
There is an objective reality to it, but it's not the only kind of time.
Right.
And once you discover laboratory time, it's not like that's the sophisticated way to think about things.
But there are many in the modern research universe who would argue with you, right?
Once we can count things, that is the only way that we should be able to do things.
That is the only way to understand the universe, which is, of course, excuse the phrase, but bad shit crazy.
Yeah, exactly.
But anyway, I totally agree with you.
And I also, separately, my little corner of that is that I've always felt perfectly in keeping with your point about transition, that fall is not synonymous with autumn.
Fall is the period in which the leaves are falling off the trees, which is more concentrated and local, right?
It's fall here, not there.
Well, but I mean, almost everything that we have to say about, say, months anyway, is local.
I mean, this is a point that I've made as well.
I was in my household, both of my parents came from the Midwest.
I used to hear April showers bring Mayflowers.
Well, in L.A., that doesn't.
April is not when the rains happen in LA, if the rains happen at all.
And so I used to think, what world is that for?
And why do we have universal sayings when they are inherently about a particular place in time?
And this is what the study of ecology is supposed to be about, is the very particular place and time where things are and how that place and time's history has led to the moment that you can now see.
But ecology mostly doesn't do that.
I agree.
And it also reveals something very interesting when the world gets reshuffled by political realities like power.
And suddenly Northern Europeans spread their culture across a large number of areas.
And their beautiful winter myth about the dude with Christmas white Christmas and a sleigh.
Oh, he travels by sleigh, does he?
You know, there are lots of parts of the world where that won't work.
Well, it's a flying sleigh.
So that sort of rescues the myth, but damn, it doesn't fit for most people, you know?
Right.
So anyway.
Well, I mean, this is we can we can be interested in globalization of the best parts of, for instance, the West without striving for homogenization.
And they seem to be conflated with one another all too often.
Yeah, I agree.
Yeah, and that really is the trick, is figuring out how to preserve diversity without either fetishizing it or making it impossible to discuss and intermingle or any of these things.
Somehow figuring out how to preserve it without without making it inviolable.
Yes.
Or pretending that it's all equal.
Right.
Pretending that it's all equal or destroying it by just constant pureeing.
Exactly.
That was exactly the term I was going to use.
Putting it into blender and hit scramble.
Liquify.
Yep.
All right.
Well, maybe we'll do that next week.
Put everything into the blending and hit liquefy.
Figure out how to straddle the gap and preserve culture and still get along and not murder each other and things like that.
In the meantime, though, you may in fact put some things into a blender and make some amazing gaspacho as you have come to do on our returns from the Iberian Peninsula.
And every time I do it, I wonder, how exactly was this done before you could plug a device into the wall?
It must have been a lot coarser.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Chunkier.
Yeah.
That's what I'm thinking.
All right.
Yes.
Well, here we are.
It is Wednesday, our usual time and place.
And we're going to start by paying the rent.
Paying the rent.
And you're going to start with one of our three sponsors.
And I will continue with the other two right at the top of the hour here.
I'm not exactly put on the light distorting apparatus so that I can see the symbols on the page.
All right.
Go for it.
All right.
You have a prop, don't you?
Totally.
Okay.
But it's a surprise.
Sorry.
So sorry.
Yeah.
Our first sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
And I will just point out what a crazy cool name for a product Caraway is in light of what it does.
Have you thought about this?
No.
All right.
Caraway is kind of a slightly exotic spice.
It has a very particular, very particular flavor profile.
Very particular, but it calls something to mind immediately.
We all, well, what is the smell of caraway?
You know, rye bread, that whole thing.
But Care Away.
This is a trouble-free pan.
Right.
Anyway, I think it's very clever.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah.
And in this case, the product deserves it.
All right.
My other favorite in terms of the name of a product is Head and Shoulders, which I think is a brilliant name for a dandruff shampoo.
Shampoo is all right, but head and shoulders.
Oh, it's probably very toxic.
It probably is.
But in any case, we digress.
I will go back to the beginning so Caraway is not part of it.
I'm not talking about it.
Dandruff.
Sorry.
That's over.
Just what?
Like, feeling like dandruff is probably a fairly modern condition.
And anything that, what, sticks it to your head?
Like, what does it even do?
Does it stick it to your head or does it release it from your head so that it's gone faster?
Or does it actually fix the problem?
I don't know.
I will say that as a young person watching television, yeah, that used to be a thing.
I remember being spurred to wonder a lot about our species as a result of the commercial in which the very handsome, well-dressed man at the supermarket shopping for produce is looked on admiringly by a beautiful young woman who is also shopping for produce,
who thinks about approaching him and upon seeing that he has dandruff, thinks better of it.
And as a young person, I wondered is that really a concern?
And if so, what does that say about, well, virtually everything?
So before we get back into the ads, the ad that perhaps affected me the most in that way with regard to my consideration of what we were as a species and how we were going to get ourselves out of this mess was the advertisement for secret deodorant, which was pH balanced for a woman.
PH balanced for women.
PH balance for women.
Back when we understood that women and men were different, but somehow had ideas about the relative acidity and basicness of our what, sweat or smell, such that one could put a different pH into their deodorant and fix it right up.
And which of the sexes is more basic?
I don't know.
And it raises all kinds of questions in the era of transness.
Well, I mean, the era of transness raises its own questions.
Many of them, yes.
One could go on at length about that, but we will not.
We will actually return to paying the rent.
Our first sponsor.
Hey, you like the name of this sponsor quite a lot.
I love it.
I think it's brilliant.
And it took me so long to realize how clever it was.
Now I'm hoping that they've actually thought about this because I now see that they've spelled it differently.
Spell it differently from what?
Well, they spelled it as the seed.
As they would.
Yes.
Because that's a word.
Right.
Anyway, I expect some communication for the fine folks at Caraway who make lovely cookware, which I'm about to tell you about.
Our first sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
Listeners to Dark Horse are well familiar with some of the myriad ways that modern life puts our health at risk, including exposures to agricultural chemicals like atrazine and glyphosate, fluoride on our water, food dyes, seed oils, and the hazards of non-stick coatings on cookware and bakeware.
Decades before we started giving seed oils the side eye and the stink eye, we threw out all of our cookware and Teflonated pans.
All of our Teflonated cookware.
That's for all of our cookware.
No.
All right.
Yeah, that sentence says exactly what you say it says.
All right.
I haven't memorized the script.
No, but you're inferring the team.
This is what dyslexics do as they read.
Does that make sense?
Teflon is toxic.
Yeah, we were completely without cookware there for a while.
Yeah.
That's not what happened.
What happened is what it says on the page and what Heather just mentioned.
Teflon is toxic.
Wow, you're in trouble.
All right.
A single scratch on Teflon cookware can release 9,000 microparticle plastics, none of which you should be ingesting, many of which you will if you cook with Teflon.
Over 70% of cookware in the United States is made with Teflon, and 97% of Americans have toxic chemicals from nonstick cookware in their blood.
Ooh.
When you cook with Teflon, it only takes two and a half minutes for a pan to get hot enough to start releasing toxins.
Enter Caraway.
Caraway Kitchenware is crafted with sustainable non-toxic materials like FSC certified birchwood, premium stainless steel, enameled cast iron, naturally slick ceramic, and more to help you create a selfer, safer, healthier home.
Caraway makes several lines of non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
Our favorites are their stainless steel line and their enameled, enameled cast iron, like this pan, which I'll tell you about in a second.
All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals, and their new enameled cast iron is offered in six stylish and beautiful colors.
This one is forest blue.
Forest blue.
Look, I'm colorblind.
I get leeway, right?
You take leeway.
Yes, well, that's how I get it.
All right.
Forest blue.
It says forest blue.
Yep.
The pots are strong and highly scratched.
My God, man.
You know what's happened here?
You've been cooking with Caraway all week, and it's made you so giddy about the product.
You just can't.
Well, it has.
Let me tell you about that, though.
Good.
So what I've done is I've perfected.
You were sick, and so we were not, we were trying not to get along.
Trying not to get each other sick, which failed.
But anyway.
So you were cooking alone.
I was cooking alone and I was perfecting what I would call the two egg omelette.
The two egg omelette is the perfect number of eggs for this little pan.
And you throw some butter in here.
You get it good and hot.
Oh, yeah.
You scramble up those eggs.
You toss them in here.
You do the omelette thing.
It's a little bit of a skill, but this pan makes it pretty easy.
And then you make it the omelet.
You put it in the plate and then you drench it in pepper.
And personally, I think pepper is one of the most underrated spices there is because it's so damn common.
And also because the pepper that you have on the table in every restaurant and all of that is usually so old it has no flavor.
So people sort of see it as uninteresting.
But fresh ground.
Salt doesn't age because it's a rock.
Pepper, the other common condiment on our tables, does.
It's a plant like pretty much everything we eat except for salt.
And so it ages and it loses its potency.
And I mean, pepper is also weird because pepper refers to many different things, including two totally different clades of plants.
But again, we digress.
Yeah.
And in fact, we had that conversation in Spain a few times with a few different people in restaurants that they didn't know what, you know, were we really asking for black pepper?
Yeah.
At one point, we got the spicy brought to us.
It was used as a noun.
It's a different story for a story for me.
Story for different time.
But anyway, this pan, two eggs, butter, and then some salt and some pepper on top of the omelet.
Perfect.
And it works great.
The nonstick aspect of it is fantastic.
All right.
All of Caraway's products are free from forever chemicals.
They're new enameled cast iron.
Yeah, yeah.
We use enameled cast iron pots to cook stews, soups, even braised large cuts of meat, roast chickens, because one of the great advantages of enameled cast iron is its uniform heat retention.
Easy to use and beautiful to you can't go wrong.
In August, our son Zach set up his college apartment with beautiful functional caraway cookware.
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DH is capitalized.
I can't remember if that matters in a URL.
But anyway, capitalize the DH.
Caraway, non-toxic cookware made modern.
Awesome.
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I've also been drinking that and it's quite good.
In fact, we have no coffee and I didn't think to go out and get it because the everyday dose is quite nice.
Excellent.
Beautiful.
Yeah, I've been having some too.
I didn't know that you had any, which is why I have been reading those ads.
I am not a qualified expert.
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I include that that's not the entire abstract, but that's the main findings from it.
And I include the one so-called negative result, which is that they don't fight an effect, to demonstrate that this isn't, and I also read the article, of course, but to demonstrate that this is not simply an article that went like, hey, look, it does everything we thought it might do and more.
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All right.
So we have three prime segments today.
I will say up front, I think all three of them have profound implications, but are slightly subtle.
So this is the kind of thing where you might want to pay careful attention so you understand what it is that we're getting at.
It's not the kind of thing that you can do in the background while you're fencing or something along those lines.
Either kind.
Exactly.
Either putting up fences or fending off adversaries with a sword.
But in any case, so we have three segments.
I think we should start with the one, the interesting bombshell that seems to have dropped regarding Harvard and its graduate programs.
Let's see if your computer is capable of showing.
Well, I don't know what thing you want.
The substack.
Substack.
The substack that you sent.
Yeah.
Oh, I don't have that pulled up, but I can do it, but it's going to take me a moment.
Okay, I don't have that, though.
So the idea here in this substack by, let's see.
You sent it twile ago?
No, last night.
On signal?
All right.
I will allow my phones.
No, I mean, I can find it.
I just don't know where you sent it because I don't see it here.
sorry about this guys that's wrong um Yeah, I did not know that you wanted me to have this.
Here we go.
Got it.
Yeah.
I have it.
All right, Jen, can you show it?
It's my computer.
Oh, yes.
Okay, so this was...
It's a sub stack by Christopher Burnett, who is an investigative journalist.
And he is reporting on a somewhat quiet announcement by Harvard that has profound implications and that follows from a discussion you and I had earlier in which you pointed out that Harvard was...
I'm happy to share what I had discussed back in May, but do you want to go through first what this precisely is?
Sure.
All right.
So Christopher Brunette, in a piece that he titles Harvard's PhD Bloodbath, the wealthiest university on earth claims it can no longer afford to train its own graduate students, so it's reinventing itself as a trade school for mechanics, question mark.
So that last part, maybe we'll get to, maybe we won't.
But just after midnight last night, the Harvard Crimson quietly published a bombshell citing financial pressure.
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced drastic cuts to dozens of Harvard's doctoral programs, a restructuring so deep that many graduate programs will effectively cease to exist.
According to the Crimson Report, which quotes five anonymous faculty sources, the reductions are as follows.
Science PhD admissions slash by more than 75%.
Arts and humanities cut by about 60%.
Social sciences reduced 50 to 70%.
History down 60%.
Biology down 75%.
It's not clear.
The German department will lose all PhD seats.
Sociology will go from six students to zero.
Those middle ones, it's not clear what is being reduced exactly.
What's going down?
Is it graduate admissions?
Is it the size of the PhD class?
Is it faculty hiring?
Is it the number of undergraduates in a major?
There are a lot of things that could be numerically reduced that aren't clear here.
I thought it was clear from the article that this was graduate seats, which is obviously slightly difficult to nail down precisely ahead of time because you admit people and you don't know whether they're going to accept.
But over the course of years, there are a certain number of seats that the department has the ability to fund.
Maybe.
It's really not clear from this list, and some of them are specified and some of them aren't.
Science PhD admissions slashed by more than 75%.
German department will lose all PhD seats, but then there's other things that just say history down.
It's not totally clear what that means.
He does say next, in addition to slashing PhD admissions, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has also instituted a hiring freeze for full-time staff, announced it would keep its budget flat for fiscal year 2026, and ceased work on all, quote, non-essential capital projects and spending.
Maybe before we read any more of that, though, can we go back to what I reported on back in May here, which, and we talked about this on episode 170-something, a letter from Harvard, what happens downstream with the eradication of federal grants and fellowships.
So as I wrote that on May 20th of this year, this week, I received the following letter.
It is reprinted here with permission by the author, although he has asked to have his name redacted.
I provide commentary after.
So let me just read a couple of paragraphs from this letter that I got from a young man who became my correspondent who goes through the PhD program.
He's in at Harvard and the announcements that at that point had just been made.
He says, this week, I received word, this week being May, mid-May of 2025, this week I received word that the grant funding which supports my research and that of countless other physicians, scientists, and training, so he's in an MD PhD program, has been terminated by the federal government.
In fact, a majority of my MD PhD cohort who have fully funded positions at the medical school and graduate school are no longer being funded.
In an unprecedented move, the Trump administration has abruptly ended NIH funding to Harvard Medical School, including the cancellation of 32 F-30 fellowship awards and both of our MD-PhD training grants representing millions of dollars lost just within our small cohort of 100 trainees, all of whom are funded by the NIH.
These cuts are not based on scientific merit, fiscal necessity, or public health priorities.
They are political and they threaten to unravel decades of progress.
So the whole letter is excellent and I recommend it.
And I feel very much for not just this young man, but anyone who was admitted to a program imagining that they'd been admitted to a university program and that that promise implicit in some ways but explicit in the letter of acceptance that one receives when being offered admission to a graduate program was that the university had his back that the universe that the that the university from whom he would be getting his degree and would be able to say
forever after, I have a joint PhD MD from Harvard, was actually going to be the university that was controlling the education and one might imagine all aspects of it for this program.
But it turns out, and here's, let's see if I do this, it'll become bigger on the screen.
So this is a lot of numbers, and I'm not going to walk through it again as I did back in May, and we'll link it in the show notes.
This is from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, an NSF report from fiscal years 2010 through 2023, which is the most recent data that we have, federally financed higher education R&D expenditures, and these dollars, these dollar amounts are in the thousands.
And so we have, for instance, and this is just in order of institutions that are receiving the most funds, Johns Hopkins, University of Washington, Seattle, Georgia Institute of Tech, Harvard actually isn't even in this top 13, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which is our alma mater for our graduate work, is top five here.
But you see the increase in federal funding dollars growing not linearly.
I don't know that it's exponential exactly, I haven't done the math, but from a number in 2010 total across institutions of 37 billion dollars to in 2023 59 billion dollars, an increase that is not doubled, but it's not far off.
And when you go and look at what the increase of funding is going to, yes, more research is being funded.
But there's also a move that I was not aware of at all when we were in graduate school, I don't think it existed yet at all in graduate, when we were in graduate school, for, especially out of NIH, for there to be grants that effectively fund entire graduate programs.
And this is what I learned from my interlocutor back in May, that the MD-PhD program at Harvard was effectively funded, not just because faculty who were doing research, who had gotten research grants, got funding to hire some graduate students or to hire some postdocs, but the graduate program itself is being funded by the federal government.
Which means that when you get a degree from one of these places, your degree should not say that you are being granted a degree from Harvard, it should say you're being granted a degree from the NIH.
But of course, no one wants a degree from the NIH.
People want a degree from Harvard or University of Michigan or wherever it is.
So this is a transformation of what it means for science to be publicly funded.
Science is not only being publicly funded, education is being publicly funded and controlled by the federal government.
Yes.
In effect, you have some aspect of subcontracting.
Effectively, the NIH is subcontracting the job of educating people in some discipline to Harvard.
Yes.
Harvard has become a brand.
Right.
Harvard's brand is on your diploma, which gives it extra oomph.
But the point is the whole substance of the program is, you know, lives or dies with the federal funding, which is why Doge reveals that this system exists.
Right.
Right.
Because canceling such a thing is like, oh, suddenly the program's gone.
Oh, that program isn't what we thought.
Right.
That program isn't what we thought.
And, you know, and, you know, of course, we haven't said what to many people will be the elephant in the room.
Although I don't think it's the most interesting part of this, which is that Harvard with its.
What is the word for endowment?
Endowment with its endowment?
Couldn't they couldn't they pay for the German department to run a Ph.D. program?
Of course they could.
Of course they could.
But the fact is that when the federal government is offering and you've got the resources to create whole departments, you know, not academic departments, but like, you know, grants, grants offices, like the one that I worked for between college and graduate school back at UC Santa Cruz, where you can see you just peel back the layer a little bit.
And you can see that there are whole slews of people of academic staff at these institutions whose job it is entirely to figure out where the money is in the federal government and extract it from there.
Well, I don't think we can't fault institutions for doing this if the money is exactly right.
So the point is, this is about a cryptic system that you don't know exists because Harvard has a, you know, many hundred year legacy.
And we all assume that Harvard is Harvard rather than it's quietly been transformed into a brand, you know, that is increasingly stamping its imprimatur on stuff because the education took place in their buildings.
But, you know, it was being directed by some hidden force.
But the point about the endowment, I mean, and I do want us to read the rest of this, it's quite short.
But the endowment is so gigantic that the fact that Harvard spots a hiccup in its ability to stay in the black with respect to its budget for a given year ought to be completely immaterial.
Right.
If this is a temporary, you know, situation because of the economics of the moment or because of the political whims of the Trump administration or whatever it might be, then the point is you would absolutely expect Harvard.
if Harvard is anything at all, to just simply decide to weather the storm until it's over.
And the hit.
It's a reveal of values.
It's a reveal of values, but it's just what non-academics are not going to realize is that a university, when it works, is like a standing wave, right?
The particular material in the wave is changing constantly, but it has institutional knowledge.
Your biology department is passing on what it knows and what its bent is and how it discovers things one generation to the next.
And these graduate students who have suddenly had their seats canceled, the point is for Harvard to say, well, you know, this is going to cost us money to keep those seats, it's admitting that their programs are phony.
Because if their programs weren't phony, you would have to invest in them to keep them going.
If it took you five years of losing money, you know, in order to get back to self-sustaining, fine, you need to do that in order that when reality returns to the university or when sanity returns, that you have a department that still remembers how to do biology.
And the point is, the irony of the whole thing is I don't think there's a tragedy here in the loss of all of these things, because I think really what we're seeing is an admission that Harvard knows these things aren't making any sense anymore.
They're not making progress.
There isn't anything important about a biology department that can't figure out how many sexes there are, you know, making sure that one generation passes on its understanding to the next because it isn't understanding in the first place.
I guess I wouldn't put it that way.
I wouldn't say that Harvard, whatever, you know, whatever it is at Harvard that knows things, that Harvard knows that the biology department and arts and humanities and social sciences and history and biology aren't doing anything of value.
I don't think it's thinking of itself as an educational institution at all.
I don't think it's a, yeah, we know none of that is for real.
It's, well, that's not what we do.
You know, we are a country club for undergraduates and we are a brand and we are a grant-getting machine and we invest in private equity.
Like, you know, those are the things that we are much more than actually educating people so as to become the next thought leaders that we all richly deserve.
No, that's not what they're doing.
It is a force of nature is what Harvard is.
Whatever else it may be, it pretends to be an educational institution.
It is a force of nature.
And this is a tacit admission that the illusion of education is for the little people, which I think is a close match for what you just said.
I agree.
It's a Potemkin University.
It's a Potemkin University, as they all are.
You know, see earlier conversation on Dark Horse about the fact that there's something suspicious about you can go to any biology department in the country.
It can be a community college.
It can be Harvard, Stanford.
It can be anywhere you want.
You'll get the same story of biology.
You won't get the idiosyncratic view that you would expect a particular department to hold based on the particular intellectual powerhouses who had passed through there.
You don't get any of that.
It's like a subway sandwich.
It's the same no matter where you go.
And the point is that means it's not real, right?
This is a consumer product.
It's not a, you know, an ancient intellectual tradition manifesting in the present.
It's not the cutting edge of knowledge.
And the evidence for this is everywhere.
I mean, I ran across one story, you know, shocking but not shocking this week, where it turns out that doctors were wrong to advise you to keep peanuts away from your children.
That causes peanut allergies, of course.
And so exposing children to peanuts is how you prevent peanut allergies.
And, you know, it's like, okay, well, how many people died because you got peanuts upside down and didn't understand allergies?
And, you know, it's just a constant stream of these embarrassing failures.
Yes.
And that is the result of a broken intellectual culture, which lives in these universities.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
All right.
So do we want to maybe finish that article?
And I do want to get to the trade school part of it.
Okay.
So here we are in, again, this is Chris Brunett's substack, and he's described what the Crimson Report out of Harvard, which attributes this to five anonymous faculty sources, are reducing.
I guess it's maybe it's all PhD admissions.
It's not totally sure to me, not totally clear to me.
And that Harvard has ceased work on all non-essential capital projects and spending.
These austerity measures, he continues, follow a wave of layoffs across other Harvard schools, including the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the School of Dental Medicine, and the Graduate School of Design.
On the surface, Harvard's austerity might appear justified.
Four days ago, the university released its fiscal year 2025 financial report, revealing an operating loss of $113 million for the year ending June 30th.
That marks a massive reversal from the $45 million surplus it reported the year before.
According to Chief Financial Officer Ritu Kalra, the deficit stems largely from the, quote, abrupt termination of nearly the entire portfolio of our direct federally sponsored research grants, end quote, driven primarily by $116 million in reimbursements for money Harvard had, quote, already spent that, quote, disappeared almost overnight.
Yeah, that number seems, but that seems like a strange statement given the numbers I just showed you guys.
I don't feel like that could be the entire, close to the entire portfolio, but let's put that aside.
Even so, he continues, it's strain's belief that the richest university on earth cannot find the resources to keep a few PhD cohorts afloat.
The newly reported $113 million loss amounts to just 1.7% of Harvard's $6.7 billion in annual revenue.
That is an amazing number, right?
1.7% of annual $6.7 billion in revenue.
That is, I mean, it just tells you that they're viewing this in the way that you're suggesting.
They have to be given, you know, again, the numbers that I was showing you on screen a little while ago are publicly available, publicly available figures that the NSF has been, the National Science Foundation has been tasked with collecting those data so that we, the taxpaying public, can see them.
I don't know if it's framed in terms of so we can see them, but because in a democracy, one should be able to see how your tax dollars are being spent.
And we can see how much money the big, the R1 universities are accepting from the government.
And yet still, this $113 million loss for Harvard amounting to just 1.7% of its annual revenue is extraordinary.
Most schools, at least most colleges, if not R1s, big research universities, have nothing close to $113 million annual revenue.
Nothing close, much less $6.7 billion.
Right.
And so this is the curtain being pulled back.
The point is this entity is cutting back on its Potemkin front, right?
The point is the educating of students is what makes the brand what it is, but they've cut back their advertising budget.
They're not going to work so hard on making it look like they're educating people in the classroom because they're losing money on it.
But it's a tiny amount.
So this is being managed based on financial concerns, not education.
But keeping it alive as a pseudo-educational institution basically does all the PR work that it needs.
It does the marketing.
It does the PR work because every college-bound high school senior knows that if they get into Harvard, that is a feather in their cap.
And everyone who has ever gone to college knows that Harvard is the place that most people want an acceptance letter from.
And if they just admitted that actually they're not about education anymore, that reputation would slip overnight.
Yes.
One other thing about that.
So you're talking primarily about the undergraduates who go and they get a degree from Harvard and it's, you know, we can debate whether or not it's worth the huge investment of money that it takes to get one of them, but it's worth a lot on the market, right?
The actual value in terms of how much you'll earn with the same level of skills is significant.
But also strangely left out of this story, and I don't mean out of Brunette's story, which I think is very well done, those graduate students whose seats are being cut have a role to play in the university that is unarguable.
What those graduate students are largely doing, the reason we so overproduce PhDs in this country, is to get people, to get students to do the work of the university in the classroom and relieve the professors from that job.
So there's a question about what, you know, Harvard, in order for its front end operation to continue to look like what it is, needs to be able to have a vigorous campus full of students who look like they're getting smarter.
How does that work if you don't have the graduate students to make all of the sections run?
Right.
So just to put a little detail on that, if you ever had a seminar class in college, it was probably run by a graduate student, not by a professor.
Small liberal arts colleges used to be the exception.
I don't know to what degree they still are.
Certainly, and there were no, faculty did all the teaching at Evergreen was one of the things that made it a different kind of place.
But it's even easier to see the role of graduate students in doing the work at the university when you're talking about lab sciences.
Labs are basically never taught by faculty.
They are always taught by graduate students.
When we were granted admission to graduate school, we were promised 10 semesters of teaching assistantships where we would be paid, not very much, but precisely to teach either labs or seminar sections, depending on the class it was, of biology classes that we were assigned to.
And in so doing, we learned to become teachers and we learned to become better biologists and all of that.
And in each of those cases, there was a professor.
There was an actual faculty member who gave the lectures.
But some of those lecture classes had several hundred students in them.
And so the students never saw the professor except at the front of the room, sort of from a distance, whereas the people who they had a relationship with were us, the graduate students.
Now, you could imagine this is just simply exploration of the possible here.
But one thing you might imagine is going on behind a seemingly self-destructive move like canceling a large fraction of your graduate programs over a temporary shortfall of money, especially when you have as much in the bank as they do.
But you might imagine, if I were Harvard and I were thinking diabolically, because that's what they do, you might imagine that the idea was, well, actually, we can make our undergraduate program look even better if we hire some of the huge glut of excess PhDs who are never going to get a real job to teach classes.
So prediction then.
The adjunct to tenure track and tenured faculty ratio will go up in the wake of this.
Right.
So the idea is you hire on a bunch of people who are technically going to be professors, but they are not on the tenure track and therefore not headed for the still measly but substantial salaries.
Yeah, they're cheap.
They're artificially cheap because they've been made artificially cheap by universities overproducing them to get them to teach the undergrads.
But one of the other things that is true about adjuncts is that, you know, A, they are underpaid and underappreciated, and they don't get perks that tenure track and tenured faculty get, like sabbaticals and such.
But they also, and this is provided as like a gift, but I'm sure originally it's to serve the institution.
There are three broad categories of things that faculty at universities and colleges are expected to do.
They're expected to do research, they're expected to teach, and they are expected to do administrative tasks.
I'm forgetting the governance, right?
And so governance can mean sitting on committees, can mean being involved in hiring decisions.
It can mean going out into the community and doing and basically doing outreach.
It can mean a lot of things, and outreach isn't exactly governance, but sort of like everything else is over in governance, and you are absolutely required to do your share of governance.
One of the things that has happened in the sciences, one of the reasons the universities have fallen apart, and sorry, this is one of my soapboxes, as you know.
But one of the reasons universities have fallen apart is that at the point that science started to become big money and universities were getting big money by having scientists who needed big grants to get their money and the overhead rates are high.
And so as long as you have scientists on the faculty who are constantly needing grants to do their research, you have more money coming in.
Well, how do you encourage all of that all of that grant getting?
You reduce the expectations on their other activities.
So you reduce the expectations of their teaching.
That's when graduate students come in and start doing the teaching for the faculty.
And you reduce their expectations with regard to governance.
And so that leaves a vacuum of scientists on governance tasks like running committees, which is where the business of the university is done.
And so I think, although I do not have the numbers to back this up, because I have not found that anyone has collected these numbers, that starting in the 90s, you started to see fewer and fewer scientists running the committees or on the either on or leading the committees that are contributing to decisions about departments, about hiring, about all sorts of things across the administration of universities and colleges, and that this contributed to the woke revolution that we see.
Because social sciences and other and made-up disciplines, those people who are not freed from governance, because they're bringing in no money and frankly no value in terms of the made-up departments to the university are now crowding the committees and making decisions that are bad for everyone.
All right.
So one hypothesis is that actually this is part of some sort of strategic shift in the direction of hiring non-tenure track faculty to make the Potemkin education look fancier.
If that was the case, then the elite faculty of the institution should look at a move like this.
Even just the risk that that's possibly what's happening should cause the elite faculty, the tenured and tenure-track faculty of these institutions, Harvard in this case, they should be looking at this because maybe they've been targeted.
And actually, again, if I were a diabolical administrator at an institution like this, I would be thinking, well, the elite faculty don't actually know anything special, right?
It's the exception.
It's the rare person who actually brings something unique to the table.
Most of these people are just, you know, speaking in fancy ways and, you know, inhabiting the costume of somebody who really knows something deep.
So Harvard could look at it and think, well, we're overpaying for this.
If they don't really have any expertise, then if we can get somebody to step into their role at a lower rate, then that would be a bargain.
So you could imagine that this is actually...
I doubt that this is Harvard trying to get rid of tenure, but that would be interesting.
Well, but, you know, imagine that what you wanted to do was curtail it.
you want to pay for as few of those fancy seats as you can.
We're going to stop the growth of...
Why are we continuing to hire people at an actual salary when we could hire them at a slave wage and have them beg for it because they can't get a freaking job with the degree that they got somewhere in the university system?
Yeah, because adjunct sucks, but adjunct at Harvard, that's some credibility.
Right.
And boy, as long as we're in diabolical administrator mode, let's think through this carefully because they're staring down the barrel of the AI era.
And the question is, who is going to be better at consulting the AI and figuring out what would be smart to say next?
It's going to be the young guns.
It's not going to be the older folks.
So you might look at the older folks in these departments and think, those are dinosaurs.
What we need are some people who know how to pretend to be professors leveraging the AI at full strength.
And that would make sense.
It would make, you know, maybe this is a future-proofing of their undergraduate program.
That took an early turn.
Yeah, it sure did.
On the other hand, in light of where we stand in history, the university that figures this puzzle out is going to beat the universities that don't, that's for sure.
True.
And I wouldn't bet against Harvard.
This may not be.
They've been at the forefront before.
Oh man, they're good at these games.
Shall we continue with this piece from Chris Brunette?
Yes, there is a cherry on top at the end, which is not where the cherry on top should be, but so be it.
Oh, and my computer has decided to stop communicating once again.
Let's see if that works.
Even so, it's trains believe that the richest university on earth cannot find the resources to keep a few PhD cohorts afloat.
The newly reported $113 million loss amounts to just 1.7% of Harvard's $6.7 billion in annual revenue.
A rounding error in Cambridge terms.
Did the Faculty of Arts and Sciences really need to cut six sociology PhD students in order to survive?
Would the school really risk insolvency if they admitted 13 history PhD students instead of seven?
Here we have just a tweet image.
Harvard's claim of hardship collapses under even cursory scrutiny.
The endowment returned $4 billion last year, climbing to $56.9 billion in total value after an 11.9% gain.
Private equity alone now counts for 41% of its holdings.
Furthermore, 2025 was a record year for donors.
Current use gifts totaled around $629 million, the most in Harvard's history, up from $528 million the prior year.
Yet we are told the school can no longer afford to train its own graduate students.
What is the point of record current use gifts if they can't even keep their basic PhD programs afloat?
Yeah, what are these people giving money for?
tax deductions.
Yes, I know.
Well, tax deductions...
And their name on a building.
Yeah, and bragging rights.
And that's, I think, what most of this comes down to.
But the bragging rights reduce when it becomes clear that actually your money did not go to education in any way.
They should reduce, except that the people they're bragging to are of the same mindset.
It's true.
You're really telling me in a year where their private fundraising hits an all-time high that six history PhD stipends are what break the budget?
The entire purpose of an endowment is to help a university weather lean years without gutting its core academic programs.
Yet, Harvard has chosen to protect its good gold pile over its scholarship, famously behaving like a hedge fund with a school attached as an afterthought.
As CFO Ritu Kara, apologies for the pronunciation, put it, the endowment is, quote, not a source of short-term relief, but a covenant across generations.
Wait, that is a great sentence in light of the fact that they have nominally just cut off their nose to fight their faith.
Yes, a covenant across generations.
Translate from administrative jargon, that means the priority is not education, but to have as big a stream of income as possible that is shielded from the influence of donors, students, and government.
And right on queue, the university's collapse into financialized pseudo-education is now being met with a political response that is just as absurd.
Two weeks ago, President Trump announced that Harvard had reached a tentative deal with his administration to restore $2.4 billion in frozen federal grunts.
Frozen federal grunts.
Now that's an image.
It's almost as good as the frozen badger steaks, ferret badger steaks.
To restore $2.4 billion in frozen federal grants on the condition that it spend $500 million to create a network of trade schools for mechanics to work on, quote, automotive plant, motors, engines, which doesn't really make any sense to me, but okay.
I mean, I think funding trade schools in general is a good idea, but I'm not sure that forcing Harvard to run one at gunpoint makes sense.
This would be a giant trade school, series of trade schools, it would be run by Harvard, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
They're going to be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things.
I wish I could do it.
I'm not going to try.
I'm not going to do imitation here.
They're going to be teaching people how to do AI and lots of other things, engines, lots of things.
You know, we need people in trade schools.
I remember when I went to school, I had some people that weren't particularly good students, but they could take a motor or an engine apart blindfolded or put it back blindfolded.
So trade schools are very important and we've lost trade schools.
We used to have a lot of trade schools in this country.
We don't have them anymore.
We have tremendous plants opening.
We want to have people top level for those plants, whether it's AI or whether it's automotor plants.
You know, we have many automobile companies open their plants in the United States.
They're all coming back.
So by opening up trade schools, because we're going to need employees, we're going to need people with skill.
By opening up trade schools, this would be a giant trade school, series of trade schools.
It would be run by Harvard.
Now, this is something that we're close to finalizing.
We haven't done it yet, but they'd put up $500 million.
Interest and everything else would go to the trade school, and you know, it's a big investment in trade school done by very smart people, and then their sins are forgiven.
That's end of Trump.
Quotation.
Yesterday, he again reiterated that, quote, they're going to open up trade schools.
And I love the idea of trade and trade schools by Harvard.
So you know, they get into like a vocational type school.
End quote.
So there it is.
The richest university on earth is claiming poverty and cutting history, philosophy, chemistry, biology, and sociology, only to reinvent itself as a glorified trade school to appease the government that froze its funding.
This is where higher education is heading.
The intellectual core is being hollowed out from both directions.
Administrators treating universities as hedge funds, politicians treating them as job training centers.
What's dying in the middle is the idea of the university itself, a place devoted to knowledge for its own sake.
It is fitting that Gen Z is named after the last letter of the alphabet.
They may also be the last generation to experience anything resembling a classical liberal education rather than debt-funded vocational training under corporate or state control.
All right, so...
What is he thinking?
Yeah, well, we'll get back to the trade schools in a second.
Let me just say first, I thought this article was very well done, very insightful.
I suggest people check out Christopher Branet's sub stack.
Yep, we'll put it in the show notes.
Blondes have more fun, but brunettes make better investigative journalists.
No.
Okay.
But the trade school idea.
Here's the part that's missing.
Can you think of anybody less well positioned to know how to run a trade school than Harvard?
No.
I mean, I cannot.
This is such a crazy idea.
I think, I mean, I've actually been to a trade school.
I went to a bike building trade school and I've visited other trade schools.
I think trade schools are a very important feature of civilization and a good one is a gem.
It's a very profoundly valuable thing.
I wouldn't go to one run by Harvard.
No.
These are.
These people disdain blue-collar work.
They disdain physical work.
They think it is beneath them.
And they're not going to understand how you do it.
I mean, the fact is you don't do it by explaining, right?
There's a process.
There is, in fact, the exact process that they're proving no longer exists in their intellectual space.
The process of passing on a skill in the physical space is a cultural process.
It's not something you can say, hey, I know it'd be a great idea.
You know, let's take Harvard's brand and throw it on a trade school.
Well, if you were going to buy it.
I was going to write the textbooks.
Right, exactly.
You can't do it.
You can't do that.
You could buy a trade school that works and you could study how it works and maybe not screw it up.
I wouldn't bet on Harvard not to screw it up, but at least if you got something that was already working, you could figure out what the process of picking up a trade actually was.
But the idea that the most over-intellectualized institution on earth is going to be the people to teach folks how to roll up their sleeves and figure out how to make and fix stuff.
No, I'm sorry.
Wrong culture.
It just is.
It's utterly and completely wrong.
I mean, this is sort of like, this is a convergence of so many of the points that we make over and over and over again.
That like you need to do something physical in the world and preferably more than one thing and more than one domain so that you have something that gives you physical feedback that can't be gamed socially by someone saying, oh, good job.
Gold star.
Well done.
Like, no, it wasn't actually.
That sucked.
And I can tell because my thing broke.
It doesn't work.
It didn't rise.
Whatever it is, right?
And, you know, the some of the programs that are being gutted at Harvard, maybe all of them, because maybe they've all stopped being intellectually interesting in any regard, precisely suffer from too much social feedback, where there is no ability in many cases to know if you've made a good point because it's not based in any sort of reality.
Well, trade school is the opposite of that.
And I am a huge fan of an actual liberal arts education.
And trade schools and liberal arts education are different things.
Harvard is supposed to be offering a liberal arts education.
It's not.
It hasn't in a while.
Trade schools don't pretend to be trying to offer a liberal arts education.
They are explicitly in the applied territory.
So I was just writing about this this morning, in fact.
So STEM, okay?
This acronym that apparently, did you know, was originally NSF was originally calling it SMET.
And someone came along and was like, that doesn't sound so good.
So we're going to reverse the order.
Smet.
Well, and it makes more sense because science and math are the precursor things.
And then engineering and technology come later downstream.
But anyway, STEM, let's go with.
Science and math underlying technology.
Smut.
So the STEM disciplines broadly, science, which is a lot of things, mathematics, engineering, and technology.
And I've just said it as if it's SMET, but science, technology, engineering, and math are not all the same thing at all.
And there's something in science called basic research, which if you haven't heard that term before, you're going to think, oh, well, that sounds uninteresting.
That sounds trivial.
That sounds like Sounds unproductive.
It sounds unproductive.
It sounds like, oh, maybe everyone new to whatever field they're getting into needs to learn how to do the basic stuff, the basic research, and then we're going to get our hands dirty.
Then we're going to start asking interesting questions and really do cool stuff.
And I guess then since the binary seems to be basic research versus applied research, then we get into the applied stuff.
Well, no.
Basic research refers to questions that are asked that don't have an explicit goal with regard to human utility.
And so engineering and technology is inherently applied, applied being the other thing.
questions that are asked, research that is done with the goal of drug development or technological development of a physical nature.
Or, you know, most of medicine is applied and technology and engineering are applied.
We want to build a bridge that doesn't fall down.
We want to create a drug that doesn't kill you and does cure something.
We want to create a microprocessor.
It would be nice if I succeeded in that, but Godspeed, maybe keep trying.
But the basic research isn't just the stuff that you do before you get to the applied research.
The basic research is the heart and the soul of not just science, but humanity.
We ask questions.
We ask questions of the world.
We ask questions of each other, of nature, of the physical universe.
And most of the advances that humans have made that have ended up having utility that you could say, ah, see, that ended up having an application in the end, have been the product of curiosity and intuition and spending time in this liminal space of not really knowing what you're doing, but you're, okay, now I've got a hypothesis and now what do I do?
I'm not sure.
Okay, I'm going to ask, I'm going to pose another hypothesis.
I'm going to do an experiment over here.
That didn't work.
I'm going to come back.
And you spend time exploring.
You end up with advances that may or may not have utility to use Flexner's famous phrase from his 1939 essay, the usefulness of useless knowledge is extraordinary.
And that, in a nutshell, is what the liberal arts education is supposed to be about and what science is about.
And trade schools are applied.
Trade schools are necessary and amazing and applied.
And what you're trying to do is learn skills that exist.
You're not trying to invent new skills for the most part in trade schools.
Learn skills that exist and become the best at them as you can.
This is not the place for unfocused or undriven exploration of new things.
That is the place of a liberal arts institution, which Harvard no longer is.
All right.
So I want to connect some dots from many things we've discussed over many different podcasts.
The difference between basic research and applied research is the distinction between hill climbing and valley crossing.
The problem is all of the universities have fallen in love with the idea of being efficient economically, which means getting rid of the faculty who are not, you know, in the latest burst of productivity, right?
So they edit down to one school of thought per discipline and they get very good at climbing the hill, that is doing the thing they already know how to do better.
And they look down their noses at basic research.
But the thing is, basic research is the thing.
I don't know if you'll be able to see this diagram here very well.
But you've got these arrows over here.
This is hill climbing.
You're on this low peak, right?
And you get very good.
You're economically efficient.
Your administrators get rid of all the dead weight that are studying things that aren't in the, that aren't productive in the immediate.
And you get really good at getting to this peak.
But where you really want to be is over here at this other peak that you don't even know where it is and what it's made of.
The only way you're going to find it is, as Heather points out, the usefulness of useless knowledge, right?
You have to be willing to study the things you don't know the value of in order to find that there's actually a much higher peak over here that you could inhabit.
Then you can climb it once you find the bottom of it.
If you knew where you were going already, it wouldn't be discovery.
Right.
Like, do we really think we already know everything?
Yeah, I think we do, actually.
We think that we have this hubris.
And maybe to some degree, all humans have always thought that we're there.
We've arrived.
There's nothing new under the sun.
We've got it all.
Therefore, oh, we can see that we want to build a thing and we're just going to go for it.
Like, there are a lot of things that could be true that you have not imagined.
The arrogance is destroying it.
It's despicable and crazy.
And I will say it is a particular defect of the boomer generation.
This is this thing.
Jerry Coyne never tires of taking me to task for pointing out what he and Dawkins both independently told me about why biology hasn't made any important theoretical progress since 1976.
They both independently, without having talked to each other, told me that it was because their generation had nailed all the big stuff and there was only cleanup left to do for everybody else, which is on its face preposterous, right?
This is biology, the most complex field there is.
And the fact is, we're at the very beginning of it.
plenty of huge stuff we don't know anything about.
So that hubris, we've nailed it.
So the only thing there is to do is to get better at what we already know is weirdly trade school mindset, right?
Let's get better at the job that we already know the name of.
So this sort of this tendency to want to, it's this tendency to corner cutting, right?
Intellectually, you have this, you know, multi-thousand year history of learning how to think carefully, right?
And then these moderns decide, well, you know what?
Most of the scientific method is wasteful, right?
Like, let's just, let's see what the data says.
It's wildly inefficient.
Right.
Let's just, you know, data is king.
Let's, let's go check out the data.
And it's like, look, you don't understand.
You can't skip.
I want to put the data is king people next to the no kings people and stuff.
Totally.
Well, you know what?
Because they're the same people.
Yeah, the no-kings people have no data.
So the fact is it would fit perfectly.
But point is that corner-cutting mentality, that administrator mentality, right?
The idea that Harvard is a powerhouse and that, you know, the real job is to maintain that endowment over the span of generations, blah, blah, blah.
You know, they're telling you how dumb they are.
Listen to them and understand how dangerous it is to have the most elite educational brand in the country, maybe in the Western world, be an institution that's this ridiculously foolish.
And then to hand them the job of teaching people how to do something.
Now, that would be truly insane.
Yeah, it is.
It's truly insane.
Yeah, either.
There's a lot more to say, but maybe.
Maybe that's the place to leave it.
Yeah, I was going to get started on museums, but maybe this is not the time.
All right, well, we can return to museums.
'Cause they're also unfunding the museums'cause they can't imagine what the footprint on their precious campus space, all of them, right?
Right.
Could possibly be doing.
What are dead things in jars doing for anyone?
What is a dead thing in a jar ever done for you, Lee?
Right, exactly.
All right.
Well, we will leave the museum conversation to another time.
I wanted to move on to a clip that I saw of Paul Offutt talking to Zubin Demania, Z-Dog, that practically knocked me off my chair until a friend reminded me that Paul Offitt had told the same story before, which I had forgotten.
But in any case, can we show this clip of Paul Offitt talking to Zubin Demana?
You don't have the clip?
Holy cow.
Heather, do you have it?
Oh, you're not going to be able to.
Well, maybe I will just have to summarize it.
Let's see if you can.
Let's see if I can maybe send it to Jen.
Yeah.
In this clip, Paul Offitt describes a meeting in 2021.
If I recall correctly, the population at the meeting consisted of Rochelle Walinski, Anthony Fauci, Paul Offutt, Francis Collins, and a couple of other people.
And as Paul Offutt tells the story, they are discussing the question of natural immunity.
Natural immunity being the immunity that one gets by being sick with a disease and recovering from it.
And so apparently at this meeting, they had a discussion in which they all understood that natural immunity was superior to vaccine immunity.
And the question on the table was, should it therefore count as a reason to exempt you from the need to get one of their vaccines?
And what they concluded was that that was too complicated.
You know, it was too subtle.
And how would we go about proving that you had COVID anyway?
So what we're going to do is just mandate that everybody get the shot.
And what we all know who faced this terrible part of history is that they gaslit us over whether or not natural immunity, in fact, did convey superior immunity.
You want to just see if, do you, were you able to find it?
Were you able to get it?
I can't play it, but it's not going to be formatted to the.
Yeah, if you would play it just so that people can see.
In February of 2022, I was asked with three other immunology virology types to participate in a conference call about whether or not natural infection should count as a vaccine.
In other words, for those areas that were still mandating vaccine, which was many in early 2022, whether they should be able to say, look, here, I was naturally infected here.
This should serve as my vaccine card.
And that meeting was held with Rochelle Walinski, Tony Fauci, Vivek Murthy from Surgeon General's office, and Francis Collins.
And then me and three other immunology biology dives.
So he started off.
He said, all right, let's introduce ourselves.
So, you know, Tony Fauci says, you know, I'm Dr. Tony Fauci from NIID.
And then Rochelle Walinski says, I'm Rochelle Walinski from CDC.
I said, we know who you are.
And the question is, who the hell are we, right?
Tony didn't need to introduce himself.
In any case, we voted on it and it was sort of tutorative, basically.
I mean, I was one of the, I think natural infection should count for obvious reasons.
I mean, actually, you're making an immune response of four viral proteins.
You in many ways make a broader cytotoxic T cell response.
I think you're better off in many ways.
The problem with natural infections is it's misnamed.
It should be called survivor-induced immunity because not everybody lives with a natural infection.
So that was, I wish we had then immediately gone to the press and said, look, here's the conversation we just had.
Here's the conversation that went, we went back and forth on this.
Because while we all basically agreed, I think that it should count, that the question was bureaucratically, would it work at a time when people could just go on the internet and say, look, I've been naturally infected and get out of it.
You know, it's just, it became more of a bureaucratic issue.
So I saw Dr. Fauci at a meeting maybe a year ago or so, because I was already getting out there saying, I think we should target high-risk groups, where I was getting a lot of pushback from public health people who felt that I had gotten off the bus.
Because see, that was the whole feeling in this.
You're either on the bus or off the bus, and there was no in-between.
So I'd gotten, I said, I said, Tony, am I wrong?
Am I wrong in making it?
He said, no, you're right.
We should target high-risk groups.
He said, the problem is the minute you say that, it becomes a nuance message.
And a nuance message is a garbled message.
If you really want to make sure those groups get vaccinated, then you recommend it for everybody.
And okay, so if we think that we should say it because my personal thinking on this is then if that's the reason we're vaccinating healthy 16 year old boys, that's not a good reason.
And just have it open.
Say it openly.
You know what I'm saying?
Because I think people are smart enough to hear it.
Yeah, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus.
So, okay, on the one hand, that clip is just maddening to find out what the discussion was behind the scenes, but there are a couple of things I want to point to in it.
Again, I said that this was a little bit subtle.
So this is where the subtlety comes in.
First of all, he covers a lot of the ground that those of us on the outside who were demonized and censored and ridiculed and coerced were trying to point out.
These shots were painfully narrow.
They focused on one antigenic motif.
All the shots focused on the same motif, and that created a very narrow kind of immunity to the extent it created immunity at all.
The idea that natural immunity is superior is based on the obvious fact that if you get sick with the virus, your immune system reacts to everything about the virus that it can react to, not just one antigen.
In this case, it's four separate proteins.
He correctly points out that the important immunity is T cell based, not antibody-based.
So another one of the little scams they ran on us was they pretended that a robust antibody response is tantamount to immunity, when in fact, at best, it is a weak proxy because the immunity you're looking for is T cell based.
So he evidences that he had all of this knowledge, even as we out in the public trying to make the case that we were being told nonsense were being gaslit.
And of the most terrible things that are done by our governmental structures, gaslighting of people who are trying to tell you the truth is at the top of the list.
Where does anybody in government get the right to tell the public that you are a crank for trying to say true things that it privately knows are true?
Where could that right possibly come from?
And frankly, I think if I read Offit correctly here, he is building a defense for himself.
100%.
Yes.
And mind you, Anthony Fauci has a pardon, a broad pardon, which makes no sense, right?
The whole idea of a pardon is that somebody, a president, can give you immunity for some crime because they think in this case, it serves the public's interest to give you immunity.
The idea of saying, well, whatever you may have done that was illegal during this period, you're covered, what the living fuck.
You can't do that.
But Anthony Fauci has one of these things.
Paul Offutt does not.
And so I think Paul Offutt is trying to say.
He's absolutely building his defense.
And he hedges in this.
He says, you know, I was one of two, I think.
I was like, were you, you think you're one of two or you think this was your position?
Well, I looked at that sentence and it's ambiguous.
And I think what he said is, I was one of two, I think that natural immunity should count.
So it is ambiguous and maybe he's hedging because it was unclear.
But okay, so you've got to be anything.
I don't trust the guy any farther than I can throw him.
And you can put Demania on that list too.
But he is at least doing us the courtesy of years too late, telling us, hey, by the way, it was T cells.
And by the way, the shots had way too narrow an immunity.
And by the way, natural immunity was understood by all of the top people who told you it wasn't good enough to be better.
Even if it's utterly self-serving, completely premeditated, made to look like it's just occurring to him to tell this story, but actually is building a defense.
It is something that we did not know.
Although you say that apparently he had said this before.
He has recounted this story before.
But in any case, the two points that I think are likely to be missed here is this group of public health elites knew the truth about natural immunity.
And that means that they denied informed consent to all of the people who had had COVID and had a right to know that the shot was worthless.
Okay.
Never mind that it was very dangerous.
The point is you had a right to think, hey, this shot's not going to do anything useful to me.
There are lots of ways that it could harm me.
I don't want it.
And that is a perfectly rational thing to conclude because I've had the disease.
Yep.
Right.
So they denied informed consent to hundreds of millions of people.
This, I will remind you, was understood to be a hanging offense in 1947.
We literally hung doctors over violating informed consent.
And this group of arrogant assholes gathered and decided on behalf of the rest of us that they were going to mandate the shot for everybody because it's too bureaucratically complicated to figure out how you would do anything else.
God damn it.
It's a hanging offense.
You tell us what you know.
Then we get to decide.
That's how it works.
You don't get to do this.
Well, and Offutt describes it as bureaucratically complicated.
I read it as Fauci, at least, believes in the fundamental stupidity of Americans.
There's no respect for the capacity of humans to do any of their own work.
Well, frankly, I don't know what it is that Anthony Fauci thought he was up to, but I don't think it was public health.
I think we have to always remember that this is a weapons guy and that this whole thing had something to do with dual-use research.
That's where the virus came from.
So not only was he going to lie to us about the risk-reward ratio of the shots in light of the fact that you get no benefit if you've already got a superior kind of immunity, not only was he going to do that, but he's responsible for the goddamn disease in the first place.
So, you know, I nominate Anthony Fauci for worst person on earth.
I mean, I just think he has a strong shot at that title.
Okay.
So they violated our informed consent.
Yep.
That would have been one thing if the shots were, let's say, tolerably safe.
But these same people knew.
I mean, Offutt is a vaccinologist.
He knows how radically different this shot was from anything that had gone before and that had never been successfully demonstrated as a platform in human beings.
So highly risky to get this shot and no value for all the people who had had COVID, which was a lot of people in 2021 when the shots finally came out.
Okay.
So the point is, are we to believe that the members of that discussion who had already had COVID took the shot anyway, just to do their part?
I don't believe it.
I think that this is a tacit admission that amongst the ultra-elites, there was an understanding.
Surely there was an understanding that the shots were very dangerous.
And as soon as you know that natural immunity gives you all the benefit, there's no argument at all for taking that risk.
Why would you do it?
It's insane.
So my assumption is there's some mechanism by which people who had already had COVID didn't take the shot.
And by the way, I think they also knew that the disease, as bad as it is, wasn't dangerous to healthy people and that it was easily managed with commonly available drugs.
So the question I want to unknow the answer to is did these people actually take the shot that they coerced so many others into getting while violating their informed consent?
I think some or all of them didn't take it.
And I think we have a right to know that.
And frankly, I think history would change if we knew the answer to that question.
That's super important.
I agree.
I think the chances of us knowing are basically zero.
And yet, given what Offutt is saying here, if he, like, he's saying that, and then he and the other presumably healthy immunologists and vaccinologists on that committee who remain unnamed in this at least public conversation, if they had the conversation that he is reporting and two of them, Offutt claims, Offit and someone else are like, no, actually, natural immunity is sufficient.
Are those two, if those two people claim that they got the shots anyway, are they stupid?
Like, either they knew that the shots were unnecessary and they definitely knew that the platform was novel and therefore it could not be known to be safe, or they didn't.
And if the claim now, which may be part of building a defense, is no, no, no, we knew a natural immunity would have been sufficient, but it was a bureaucratic hassle, then I'm sorry, privately, you don't go ahead and get the untested novel technology out of a sense of what?
Like lack of bureaucratic hassle?
Like that's not the world you're playing in, guys.
Well, and, you know, look, I think the entire game across civilization, the entire corrupt fiasco is based on double standards.
Yeah.
And, you know, do I think anybody in that room would blink an eye at the idea that they were privately going to do something different?
I mean, how many times did we see footage of, you know, our governmental officials, you know, gathering soberly, putting on their masks moments before the cameras go on, this kind of thing, right?
You know, privately partying it up at the same time they were telling us to stay away from each other.
I mean, double standards is the whole story, as you would expect it to be.
And I think it would be wise for those of us in the public to realize what the message is, right?
These people never cease to posture as if they are on our team and acting out of an abundance of caution.
It's bullshit on every topic.
They don't care about us, right?
What they are doing is about them.
And I think, frankly, they are indifferent to us.
We are like furniture to them.
We are like cattle, right?
So it's time we got that message and we stopped listening when they furrow their brow at all concerned about our health.
And oh my God, it's bird flu.
We've got to, you know, kill the ostriches.
No, I'm sorry.
This is not motivated out of concern that there's going to be an outbreak of bird flu and innocent people are going to die.
No, that's about something else.
I don't know what it is.
New vaccine, some kind of new control measures, but it is not about the well-being of the public, period.
The end.
I don't believe it.
Yeah, because there's been no indication for years that there is any care for the public.
No, anytime you get a peek behind the curtain, the exact opposite is what shows.
It's just the opposite, right?
We are an inconvenient problem to be dealt with.
We are not a matter of compassion for them.
I agree.
All right.
Well, you have some third topic.
I don't know what it is.
I'm trying to remind myself of, well, let's quickly do it because it's very timely.
Can you show the, hopefully I did send this to you, Jan.
Can you show the Robbie Starbuck tweet?
This, I thought, was, I mean, I have, there's been no time to vet this, but there are indications that this is exactly what Robbie Starbucks says it is.
So let's just read the tweet.
Oh, well.
He says, huge news.
I am suing Google today.
What you're about to see is insane.
Since 2023, Google AI, Bard, Gemini, and Gemma have been defaming me with fake criminal allegations, including sexual assault, child rape, abuse, fraud, stalking, drug charges, and even saying I was in Epstein's flight logs.
My God.
It's all 100% fake, all generated by Google's AI.
I have zero criminal record or allegations.
So why did Google do it?
Google's AI says that I was targeted because of my political views.
Even worse, Google execs knew for two years that this was happening because I told them and my lawyers sent cease and desist letters multiple times.
This morning, my team at DH, no, D, it's Hill and Law Hold on.
It's Harmeed Dylan.
filed my lawsuit against Google.
And now I'm going public with all the receipts because this can't ever happen to anyone else.
It even fabricated statements denouncing me from President Trump, Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance over sexual assaults that Google completely invented.
One of the most dystopian things I have ever seen is how dedicated their AI was to doubling down on the lies.
Google's AI routinely cited fake stories by creating fake links to real media outlets and shows complete with fake headlines so readers would trust the information.
It would continue to do this even if you called the AI out for lying or sending fake links.
In short, it was creating fake legacy media reports as a way to launder trust with users so they would believe elaborate lies that it told.
Some of the news outlets and people that Google's AI impersonated are listed below.
Google's AI cited them all as either reporting on these fabricated allegations and crimes or cited them as having denounced me for sexual assault.
Okay, then there's a long list of people.
As a rule, AI must never harm humans.
It must never defame or manipulate no matter your politics.
Bias in AI is very, very, is a very, very serious issue.
If you don't fix this now, if we don't fix this now, we're in big trouble.
This can destroy lives, reputations, and livelihoods.
If we don't win this fight, then you no longer control your reputation because AI will define who you are to the rest of the world.
You better hope it likes you.
All right.
So that's enough of this tweet.
This story, which I take to be what Robbie Starbucks says it is, Harmee Dylan wouldn't be signed on to fight on his behalf if this were in any way not what he represents.
Yeah, no, and he doesn't.
I don't, you know, I don't know the man personally, but he's not prone to hyperbole.
Yeah.
So anyway, I would take this at face value.
What a terrifying story.
And imagine the future.
You know, at the moment, this is still early in the AI era and the AI is not spectacularly good at any of these things.
And there are courts, but the degree to which AI is going to shape our viewpoint on everything and have the ability to wreck people.
And so, you know, as bad as it is to imagine a future of centralized bank digital currencies and social credit scores, this takes it to the next level.
The idea that, you know, it's not even that you behave in a way that displeases people and they unperson you.
They can pretend that you behaved in a way that justifies your unpersoning.
And how are you ever going to prove that you didn't do it?
And, you know, again, this is the dawning of this AI era.
This is the only moment at which we get to have this conversation because it's visible and because maybe there's a court in which we can adjudicate these things.
But I was stunned, actually.
I was looking at this, trying to understand it.
And I happen to look into the replies.
And there's something equally troubling there.
Jen, do you want to show the reply to that?
Okay, so go back up so I can see who the it's ex-Marianne M, who says you can add this one to your collection for Charlie and then shows an AI overview reporting Charlie Cook,
Charlie Kirk took his own life after a series of public statements expressing his belief that the American dream was out of reach for young people and that political violence was a threat to democracy.
Kirk, the 31-year-old co-founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative organization, was killed by a gunshot at an event in Utah University.
So I assume that that's just a hallucination of the AI or a fantasy or whatever it is.
But, you know, as I said at the very beginning, right after the emergence of this credible AI, I said, look, this is a new species.
You don't know what it is.
And this is chilling, right?
I mean, you know, in the case of Charlie Kirk, the AI is not going to convince us all that that was a suicide.
But, you know, imagine a world three years down the road where you literally can't look at a video and know whether the event happened.
In fact, it will be undetectable at some point very soon.
And the point is you will be scratching your head.
Well, what actually happened to that person?
Right?
You'd be able to flat out murder somebody and then AI it into a suicide.
You know, who knows what's going to happen in the future.
It's going to make the landscape for those who wish to abuse their power that much more amenable.
And for those of us who wish to see a uniform set of explicit rules that we all abide by, we are going to be at a massive disadvantage.
I'm speechless.
Yeah.
It's really something else.
In good news, the first two of our four Ralston lectures have been released.
And we've talked about Harvard and its failure to be a liberal arts institution and its imminent failure to be a trade school.
And we've talked about AI and I don't know how the middle story relates exactly, but failures of education, failures, the Cartesian crisis that we're all living through and the lack of any institutions that actually make any sense are hallmarks at the moment.
And our time at Ralston College this last April, where we gave the Sophia lectures, four in all, revealed to us that there is at least one institution that's truly extraordinary out there.
And they don't have undergraduates yet.
It's a single master's program that they offer that begins in Greece every year.
And it's just extraordinary.
We spent time with Stephen Black with the founder and many of the faculty and last year's class cohort of students, of master's students.
And they're just doing education the way education should be done.
And we're both really pleased with the lectures that we gave there.
And so those are out now.
And I feel like it's just a little bit of a rejoinder to some of the insanity we've been talking about.
Yeah, it exceeded all expectations.
It really did.
The quality of the education.
I was really stunned at what they're able to accomplish and have nothing but admiration for the whole crew and the entire class of students that they had gathered.
Really, it was extraordinary to see how many high-quality minds they had gathered and how they had facilitated them functioning as a real academic community in the way that used to exist.
So yes, there are signs of hope.
I do want to connect one last thing.
Go for it.
Why do we need to be able to think?
Well, we need to be able to think because our well-being depends on it.
And there was a story that I found maddening that I ran across recently.
Jen, can you show the video with the ballot?
There's a ballot proposal in California.
I believe it's measure number 50 about redistricting.
And something interesting has cropped up in the mail-in ballots related to this redistricting measure that is favored by the Democrats, including Gavin Newsome, the governor.
vote is cast right here set the ballot in this way Okay, so let me just say a couple of things.
Redistricting is a place that both parties cheat.
So hold on.
Just so that for one thing, some people will not have seen it.
But what it looked like was someone voting on a physical ballot on this measure, and there were only two options.
It's a binary, yes or no.
And it looks from the positioning here, like a no vote is visible on the outside of the ballot that you're sending in.
But that a I mean, I guess that just tells you, like the vote is visible regardless, because a no vote is visible.
Although if you don't know that something should be visible, you don't necessarily know that a yes vote is visible.
To make it clear, you put the ballot in the envelope.
And there's only, and because the address has to show, there's only one way to put the ballot in the envelope.
That's not the case.
Oh, okay.
So this is where this goes.
So you put the ballot in the envelope, and if you've put it in in the right orientation, and then you tap it down so that the paper falls to the bottom left corner of the envelope, a no vote shows clearly.
And there is inexplicably a hole in the envelope.
There are always holes in these envelopes, I think, to show that the ballot is contained rather than they are empty.
So the question is, did somebody put that hole somewhere that would allow no votes to be detected?
Now, okay, this is maddening that the vote is visible, but there's a question about what it means.
Was this intentional or was this a mere accident of the fact that ballot envelopes traditionally have holes and, you know, could be happenstance.
But what troubled me was that there was a large number of people who responded to the discovery that, and mind you, I think there were different envelopes in different counties, but there were a large number of people who responded by saying, come on, get over it.
And do you have this one tweet?
So this is a tweet.
This person says, as my friend some handle says, there are four ways to put the ballot into the envelope.
Three of them don't show through the hole that they're the holes that are there for visually impaired signature line.
End quote.
So turn your ballot over, fold it inside out before putting in the envelope.
Problem solved, just freaking vote.
Now, this is troubling to me because it involves either an extreme instance of sophistry or a complete failure of understanding.
It has to be one of the two.
If we imagine that that hole was placed by someone who intends to use the information about which envelopes contain no votes, presumably by disappearing those ballots at some stage in the process and adjusting the count, then the fact that there are four ways to put the ballot in the envelope Two of which you won't happen onto because they require folding the ballot in the opposite way that it's currently folded.
Let's put it this way.
One of the natural ways to fold this ballot and put it in the envelope results in the vote showing.
From the point of view of a cheater, if you were in the mindset of a cheater and you placed that hole so that it would reveal no votes, you don't need to reveal every no vote.
The fact that you have a way to immunize your no vote so nobody can see it doesn't mean a damn thing.
And in fact, you can detect lots of things through that hole.
You can detect that somebody has folded their ballot inside out.
Maybe you presume that that's a no vote because somebody is responding in this way.
So if you just want to put your thumb on the scale and adjust a, you know, a slight no victory to a slight yes victory, then you don't need perfect information on all ballots.
All you need is to know that a certain number of ballots are highly likely to be no votes and to disappear them.
So from the point of view of a cheater, the ideal thing is to have a kind of noisy measure that gives you enough power over the vote count while maintaining deniability, right?
If the vote count is coming in overwhelmingly no, then maybe you don't cheat in order to protect your right to cheat in a future election.
If the vote's going to be close, then you start looking for ballots in which the thing shows.
So look, let me just say this clearly once.
There is noise in the electoral process.
It is imperfect by its nature.
There is no strong argument.
If you have an election and somebody wins by a handful of votes, the fact that they do take the seat isn't vastly more just than they don't take the seat because you don't know how many people got sick and didn't go.
The point is, as long as the slop in the system is equally likely to go both ways, so that on a razor-thin vote, you know, team A wins half the time and loses half the time, the system of democracy works.
But if some team engineers a mechanism so they win a disproportionate number of the noisy razor-sharp elections, then the point is that is a massive distortion of democracy.
And the idea that there are a lot of ways, for one thing, we have, you know, 50 different state electoral systems for historical reasons, right?
We don't have a federally synchronized ballot in order to.
No, I mean, and I think in general, they're different by county because there's different measures by county as well.
Right.
Like, it's not just 50, it's thousands.
It's thousands of different ballots, but you could have a regulated system in which something that was highly reliable was agreed upon and the particular details of what was being voted on in your county adjusted what was, you know, added and in what specific way.
And it was the same in every county, no matter where in the country you were.
But what we have is a messy system in which so many different jurisdictions are setting their own rules that the ability to cheat here and there, and especially in federal elections where some Maricopa County may be disproportionately important because it always comes down to which way is that county going to go.
The opportunity for cheating is profound.
And you really, you have two choices.
You can have a system in which cheating is so unthinkable that it's very, very rare, right?
Where the penalties are very high and we agree on a system that makes it very difficult to do without running a risk.
Or you can have a system in which cheating is relatively common, but it is equally likely to go both ways.
That is a vastly worse system.
But what you can't have is a system in which the people in power, let's say the Democrats in California, have the ability to, and this is sort of a, it's meta-cheating because if they're cheating, again, I don't know if this was a happenstance or not, but if they're going to cheat on ballot measure 50, well, that's a redistricting measure.
So redistricting is already cheating.
So the point is, if you want to cheat in order to cheat better at redistricting, that's a double cheat.
And I don't know why you wouldn't pre-cheat.
Yeah, why wouldn't you pre-cheat?
Exactly.
So again, these people don't care about us.
This is about power.
We voters are an annoyance.
Elections are an annoyance.
But we need to start tending our rights.
And we all need to agree, blue, red, and otherwise.
We all need to agree that a system in which you can't cheat is the one that serves us all.
We have to agree on that.
And that means we have to punish the people who want to cheat, irrespective of what side they're on.
Doesn't matter if they're on your side, they got to be punished too, because this is an intolerable level of slop and a terrible opportunity for the worst people to gain and hold power through illegitimate means.
Absolutely agree.
You want to show your frying pan once more before we sign off?
I mean, don't I always?
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Again, this is Forest Blue.
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No, this frying pan can be used to make excellent two-egg omelets.
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Hell yeah.
All right.
We have a three-hour Q ⁇ A on locals this Sunday to make up for the fact that we were in Spain last month and didn't do one.
So starting at 10 a.m. Pacific time, going for three hours until 1 p.m., join us on locals for that.
That'll give us a lot of time to get to many questions, and I'm sure there will be laughter.
It's too early for drinks, but water.
Yes, there will be plenty of water.
Yeah.
And yeah, like that, I guess.
Come join us on Sunday.
And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love.
